Religion Dispatches
…Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I didn’t get one, but my citizen journalist dues are current. Stay tuned….
Read More
…ability of cell phones to be used for impure activities, some Jewish cell-phone users have requested so-called “kosher” phones. The idea is to offer conservative Jews a phone that is free of “corrupting influences” of the sort that are already avoided by ultra-orthodox Jews through a ban on television and some radio. Reuters reported in February 2008 that Bezeq Israel Telecom launched a new “kosher” landline phone service, which will block calls…
Read More
…ism because they fly in the face of the claim that oppressed people must always be aligned with one another. But they are real nonetheless and ignoring them undermines the credibility of the broader movement. None of the above is meant as a repudiation of cultural progressivism. The movement has done a great deal for a great many. My own debt is massive. I have always been a brown kid; cultural progressivism made me a person of color. Beyond its c…
Read More
…ad range of conservative legal and policy organizations. Natural law has always been hiding in plain sight. Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things magazine, said as much when he half-facetiously wrote the following, in response to my 2021 New Republic article on originalism and natural law: [Schwartz] singles out First Things (“the most intellectually serious and influential journal of the religious right”) as particularly nefarious, leading the w…
Read More
…depends on the extent that one’s religious worldview is imported into the online world. Second Life In the online world of Second Life, “residents” design their own avatars and engage in unscripted encounters, making real religious dialogue a possibility. Rita King (and her avatar Eureka Dejavu), engaged in some tough discussions about cultural differences with Muslims, as reported in Dispatches From the Imagination Age. Eureka describes a time w…
Read More
Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
Read More
…ut that new phone, that new gadget, that new dress. And yet the minute you purchase your phone or laptop, it is obsolete. Every six months, fashion editors tell us our entire closet is out—our clothing is disposable. Shopping is not only a lifestyle, it is a form of entertainment. Whether it is infomercials and shopping networks or makeover shows, we not only shop, we watch people shop. The act of shopping has also become increasingly depersonaliz…
Read More…, she argued, even if the company offered higher wages to its employees to purchase insurance through the ACA’s exchanges, it would still pay less than offering a plan. Although Chief Justice John Roberts asked whether offering health insurance to its employees was part of Hobby Lobby’s religious commitment, other justices were skeptical. Ginsburg shot back that “provision of health care is not a religious tenet,” and Kagan distinguished between…
Read More
…to buy into the vision of Glenn Beck and others who make it easy to turn away from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy…
Read More
…y airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us out to be (our earliest heroes include Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a…
Read More